Monday Progress on "Arkham After Midnight"

Wow did I get a lot done today.

The ploxel engine is spitting out vignettes that actually hook up to each other.  For instance, I have an old shack in the woods where you can find mundane items, and an old tomb where you can find arcane items.  When I add mundane and arcane items into the mix, they show up appropriately in those locations.  There's a "thread" of a mystery going from scene to scene, and it's all working pretty well.

The down side is that it's a lot more complicated to make these pieces modular and yet sensical.  Things that would be straightforward if I didn't want the mystery to be procedurally generated get a little complicated, which gets in the way of producing the ploxels quickly, but I was still able to generate several ploxels tonight and the sprites to go with them in fairly short order, so I'm pretty happy.

Here's what the game looks like currently:

On the docket for tomorrow:

• Add in hand-to-hand combat support.  Currently, there's only ranged combat.
• Add in a character creation screen.  I've got several investigator sprites already made, but I need a way to let the player choose one.  I also want to give the player a little agency on what they start out with, although I have yet to come up with some good differentiators because there's not a lot of mechanical depth to the gameplay yet.  So far, about all I could do is adjust a balance of first aid resources to bullets to gun accuracy to gun damage.
• More ploxels!  More sprites!  More enemies!
• Figure out how I'm going to handle "finale" encounters.  I doubt I'll get to the implementation phase tomorrow, but it would be good to get some planning in for that.

But now, it's time for a break.